
“All men do the best they can. But none meet life honestly and few heroically.”
As quoted in Infidels and Heretics : An Agnostic's Anthology (1929) edited by Clarence Darrow and Wallace Rice, p. 206
“All men do the best they can. But none meet life honestly and few heroically.”
As quoted in Infidels and Heretics : An Agnostic's Anthology (1929) edited by Clarence Darrow and Wallace Rice, p. 206
§ 5
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius
“The best men are but men, and are sometimes transported with passion.”
11 How. St. Tr. 1206.
Trial of Sir Edward Hales (1686)
“In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man — and the Word is with Men.”
Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)
Context: We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.
Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world — of all living things.
The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.
Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.
So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man — and the Word is with Men.
“The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”
Source: The Woman in White
“Clever men are good, but they are not the best.”
Goethe.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
Variant: Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
“Now, very few [physicians] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.”
"You Should Face Up to Your Death, Says Author".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)